Nigel Goldenfeld Extended Biography (509 words).
Nigel holds the Chancellor's Distinguished Professorship in Physics and joined UCSD in Fall 2021 after being at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1985-2021. Nigel's research spans condensed matter theory, the theory of living systems, hydrodynamics and non-equilibrium statistical physics.
Nigel received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara. From 1985-2021, Nigel was in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he eventually held the position of Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Physics. He also led the Biocomplexity Group at the Institute for Genomic Biology, and founded the Institute for Universal Biology there, which was part of the NASA Astrobiology Institute from 2013-2019. In 1996, Nigel co-founded NumeriX, a company that provides high-performance software for the derivatives marketplace. Selected honours include: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, University Scholar of the University of Illinois, the A. Nordsieck award for excellence in graduate teaching and the American Physical Society's Leo P. Kadanoff Prize (2020). Nigel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.Nigel received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1982, and for the years 1982-1985 was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California at Santa Barbara . Since 1985 he has been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, with sabbatical positions at Stanford University and the University of Cambridge. Nigel's research explores how patterns evolve in time; examples include the growth of snowflakes, the microstructures of materials, the flow of turbulent fluids, the dynamics of geological formations, and even the spatial structure of ecosystems. Nigel's interests in emergent and collective phenomena extend from condensed matter physics, where he has contributed to the modern understanding of high temperature superconductors, to biology, where his current work focuses on evolution, microbial ecology and astrobiology. Strongly committed to teaching, Nigel is well-known in the physics community for authoring one of the standard graduate textbooks in statistical mechanics, and is widely regarded as one of the most popular graduate-level lecturers in the Department of Physics. In 1996, Nigel took an entrepreneurial leave-of-absence to co-found NumeriX, an award-winning company that creates high-performance mathematical software for the buy-side derivatives marketplace. He has served on a number of Editorial Boards, including The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Physical Biology, and the International Journal of Theoretical and Applied Finance. Amongst his awards, Nigel has been an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, a University Scholar of the University of Illinois, and has received the Xerox Award for Research, the A. Nordsieck Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and the American Physical Society's Leo P. Kadanoff Prize. Nigel is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.